The Definitive Guide: Get Your Google Manual Link Penalty Removed

The Definitive Guide:
Get Your Google Manual Link Penalty Removed
What did your ‘SEO company’ achieve for you, a penalty perhaps? Well, you’re not
alone. According to Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, Google initiates
more than 400,000 manual actions every month.
In addition there over 20,000 reconsideration requests processed in that same time period.
We’ve currently undertaken some 60 unique clean-up projects for clients and that number is
on the rise. That's a lot for especially for a boutique agency like ourselves. We can say from
experience that most reconsideration requests are turned around in 30 days or less. The
problem is not the removal request process, it's getting there!
Me Build you Links – Love you long time
Buying automated link building services, paying peanuts for SEO services, swapping emails
with shady characters who “guarantee page 1” rankings – you knew it was wrong, but you still
cut those corners.
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“So the spammy link building work that our previous SEO guys did has come back to bite us in the
ass. Overnight our Google rankings completely disappeared!”
Sound like your story? It’s too late for sorry, let’s just clean this **** up!
If you’re desperately seeking search ranking recovery because your business and livelihood
depends on it – fear not – you’re in the right place to start the road to recovery.
What is a Manual Penalty?
If you’re reading this article it’s likely you already know what it is, or at least have experienced
the consequences of such a penalty. However there are many website owners out there who
have placed their trust in SEO services or consultants who used low quality/spammy link
building tactics. Subsequently these website owners have been left up the creek without the
proverbial paddle. So let’s refresh ourselves of the two Google slaps.
There are two types of spam penalties (Manual Actions) applied to a website.
1) Site-wide matches action that impact an entire website. This type of penalty means you
website is likely struck off and potentially de-indexed from Google entirely.
2) Partial matches penalties impact individual URLs or sections of a website. It's not
uncommon for pages on a popular site to have manual actions, particularly if that site serves
as a platform for other users or businesses to create and share content. If the issues appear to
be isolated, only individual pages, sections, or incoming links will be impacted, not the entire
site.
However in our experience both actions still impact the wider site in general, partial matches
being the lesser of two evils - but don't hate Google, they didn't spam your site.
Check your Penalty Notices
You can use the Manual Actions page in Google Webmaster Tools to view actions currently
applied to your website. It may take some time before recent updates to your site's status are
reflected on this page and in our search results.
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Why did I get a Spam Penalty?
The likely cause of a penalty is ignoring the basic principles and instead romping off in pursuit
of link schemes to garner backlinks.
Quality guidelines - basic principles:
•
Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
•
Don't deceive your users.
•
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd
feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a
Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if
search engines didn't exist?"
•
Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand
out from others in your field.
•
Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?#3
Link schemes - spammy offsite links:
•
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank.
•
Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.
•
Linking to a site for the sole purpose of getting a link back.
•
Building a link network for the purpose of linking.
•
Large-scale article marketing or guest posting using keyword-rich anchor text.
•
Buying advertorials or articles that include links that pass PageRank.
•
Creating and distributing press releases with 'optimised' anchor text.
Translated: Stop trying to game the system and delivery quality.
Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824
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The Link Removal Process in Brief
You’ve establish you’re in trouble; you’ve landed yourself with a penalty. Denial is no longer in
your vocabulary, it’s time for action.
In its simplest form the penalty recovery process looks like this:
1) Link discovery from many sources
2) Verifying active/live links
3) Manual auditing each link by quality, authority and relevance
4) Contacting webmasters requesting link removal
5) Submitting a disavow for none responding webmasters
6) Ensure your house is in order before you proceed
7) Submitting your reconsideration request
Ready? Let’s get started…
Step 1 – Discovering your Backlink Profile
The big first step is to thoroughly establish your backlink profile using multiple sources, using
Google Webmaster Tools (WMT for short) alone is not enough. To support WMT you would be
well served signing up for the following services:
•
Ahrefs – boasts one of the largest active backlink archives around, you’ll get a comprehensive
picture here.
•
Majestic SEO – nearly as big as Ahrefs and often returns slightly different results. A solid partner.
•
Moz Open Site Explorer – whilst not as complete as the above two, Moz still unearths some fresh
links that the other two may fail to spot. Moz OSS makes a worthy supporting act.
Once you’ve collated your backlinks from all sources, compile them in a spreadsheet and
remove exact matching duplicates. Save it and keep it safe, you’re just getting started.
Step 2 – Be Efficient, Chase Active Links *only
There are many tools out there that can check your links for you, but seeing as we’re using a
good old fashioned spreadsheet it would seem appropriate to use a tool that integrates
seamlessly with this process.
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Enter stage left – Niels Bosma’s “SEO Tools for Excel”.
You can automate the process using other tools of course but the above serves the purpose
well and perhaps more importantly, to ease your pain, it’s free. If you find it useful do consider
donating of course.
Use the tool to identify active links and cast aside inactive links – they should be placed in a
separate sheet for safe keeping, for reference and ‘just in case’.
Hint: remove active “nofollow” links. Yes it’s true the disavow process essentially marks these
links as nofollowed anyway, but having no link is better than a spammy nofllowed link - even if
it is just for your peace of mind.
*Caveat: check your Webmaster Tools (WMT) for links that were flagged inactive in other
sources, if WMT reports them then play it safe and add these to your final disavow list.
Step 3 – Thorough Backlink Audit
It’s an arduous task, it takes time and patience, but at this stage you should leave no stone
unturned.
Yes there are services out there that claim to audit links for you by grading them, but in our
humble opinion nothing beats a manual link-by-link check. Yes you read that correctly,
checking link-by-link.
In many cases, you will have multiple links from the same domain. Fortunately in these
instances you only need to establish if the domain is trustworthy because if it isn’t you want all
references to your site removed.
You may have a few hundred or ten thousand links, but visiting each site is the only true way of
understanding if the link is worth keeping. There are many cases where the domain name and
URL will be a clear give-away this link isn’t to be trusted, in those cases of course you need not
visit them.
Needless to say the audit process if done correctly should only be required once, so it’s worth
investing the time and effort now. Do the job right and you do it once. Rush it and you'll be
back here time and time again.
Remember being thorough is the word of the day (or week, if you have ten thousand
backlinks). You’re not pruning a perennial; you are taking a machete to the entire garden.
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3 Simple Rules – Follow them
As part of your audit you need to establish if a backlink is guilty of any of the below
misdemeanours, if it is mark it for removal - take no prisoners!
Low Quality – is the website linking back to you of questionable quality? Does the linking page
read correctly or is it spun, gibberish content? Was the website designed with humans in mind
or does it look like a template or automated in anyway? Is the backlink keyword focused, does
the link look unnatural or forced?
Low Authority – does the website linking to you have a decent authority (some of the
previously mentioned link discovery tools will reference authority and citations)? Is it a
spurious or odd looking domain name? Does it itself have a decent backlink portfolio? Does it
have *PageRank (PR) of 1 or more? Is the website indexed on Google?
No Relevance – is the site linking to you relevant in context to what you do? This is simple, if
you’re link is a on a blog about cheap holidays and you’re selling pressure washers then you
need to ditch the link. Remember don’t be precious, tenuous links need not apply!
Hint: wash your hands of ‘web directories’ that aren’t niche specific, manually moderated and
seldom generate traffic to your website. A web directory that doesn’t generate traffic to your
website is a strong signal it was built purely for link building purposes, in other words gaming
the system.
*Caveat: as long as Google keeps updating it PageRank we're using it as an audit metric. So
say goodbye to your ‘PR0’ links!
Step 4 – The Email Outreach Simplified
Another big hurdle at this stage is understanding exactly how to go about contacting all these
website owners. We’ve noticed other articles showing a lack of detail in this area, fear not we’ve
found a tool that does the job and it’s cost effective too.
Rmoov does a simple but effective job of gathering domain contact details and scheduling
emails out to webmasters on your behalf. The essential features and process are as follows:
•
Add a list of URLs
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•
pull contact information for each domain
•
Customize email templates and start your campaign
•
create and send email, follows up with reminders, automatically checks links, provides a
reporting system for domain owners, marks domains cleaned up and auto-fills a record of every
step straight into a Google doc so you can see what's happening along the way.
We recommend you run this process for a month with at least one contact per week to
webmasters.
Hint: in order to break the link removal request fatigue, it's extremely important to write an
effective link removal request. Keep it short and specific to avoid the recipients spam folder.
Step 5 – Disavow, with a Word of Warning
First things first - do not rely on the disavow tool alone. If you’ve skipped past the first four
steps thinking this is your silver bullet, reverse up and read steps 1 through 4.
Disavow is considered a last resort tool by Google and should only be used when every effort
has been made to remove poor backlinks manually.
We see time and time again website owners downloading a list of links and merely disavowing
them.
Stop - you’re wasting your time!
If you struggle to remove at least 50% of your low quality ‘spam’ then try harder, or at least
keep trying. 50% as a minimum amount of links removed is a good rule of thumb but really you
should aim higher.
One round of link removal requests isn’t going to cut it.
We use the Disavow tool to complement our efforts, hit your minimum of 50% or higher and
then finally submit a disavow for the remainder of your low quality backlinks.
Hint: you only have to submit TLDs (top level domains) in your disavow file and not each
specific link.
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Step 6 – Housekeeping!
Ensure your house is in order before you proceed. Before you submit your website for
reconsideration, please whatever you do, don’t fall at the final hurdle. Go over your website
and ensure you aren’t employing spammy tactics as per the Google guidelines mentioned
earlier in this article.
In essence web pages, their titles, their content and layout should all be designed for human
consumption. Keyword stuffing and hidden content need not apply here.
Step 7 – Reconsideration Request
A single page written text document is usually all it takes, but you must cover the bases.
Matt Cutts repeatedly indicates that there are 3 aspects to getting your manual penalty
overturned.
1) Give background on how and why you got the penalty
2) Detail how you fixed the issue
3) Assure the search giant that you will NOT violate their quality guidelines again
The body of your reconsideration request should discuss these 3 points in detail.
In addition in our letter, Hello Google Search Quality Team, we cover off the fact we’ve
removed X number of links and the reason behind removing them (in line with Google’s
guidelines).
Furthermore we explain how we went about this process, an overview, and how many links we
failed to remove which were submitted via disavow as a ‘last resort’ because the website
owners failed to respond after our repeated attempts contacting them.
A very good idea is to place your spreadsheet contents of all links removed in a Google doc
that you cite in your reconsideration request. This forms a solid, credible backbone to your
request.
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Manual Spam Action Revoked
If you followed every step herein in its entirety and completed a thorough audit, it’s likely
within 30 days of submitting your reconsideration request you’ll be absolved of your sins. You
should be welcomed in WMT with something along the lines of this:
The four magical words everyone in the above situation longs to hear – “Manual Spam Action
Revoked”!
Pat yourself on the back on a job well done, but keep the champagne on ice because…
A Recovery of Sorts, the Biggest Caveat of All
We hate to say it so late in the game, but a penalty recovery is a very complicated thing. There
are a lot of factors that go into it and nothing is really guaranteed.
Even the successful removal of a manual penalty will not guarantee your previous
rankings are restored.
There is no way around the fact that cleaning links weakens websites. A penalty has cast doubt
on your entire website’s link profile. It’s common to see links pointing to and supporting other
domains that are now deemed inappropriate for you.
Perhaps more ominously Google penalties get more severe for repeat offenders. After being
penalised you must strictly adhere to the Google Webmaster Guidelines forever more. This is
the first step in what is likely a long road to recovery regaining traffic and rankings.
Now it’s your duty to build quality content and links overtime, the right way.
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